Baby, Would I Lie?

by Donald E. Westlake

  But Warren pointed to the papers in Jim’s hands and said, “That stuff’s our secret. We’ll wait.”

  “You’re the boss,” Jim said.

  That’s right. Warren Thurbridge was not Ray Jones’s criminal lawyer. He was much more than that; he was the chief attorney of Ray Jones’s defense team. As such, he was a cross between a battlefield commander and a movie producer, and he looked the part: distinguished, handsome, confident, heavyset, a very well preserved sixty-one, with silvery hair and piercing eyes and a booming laugh that could as readily turn into a roar of rage or a silken snakelike hiss of contempt.

  What Warren Thurbridge was good at was deploying large forces to powerful effect. He wouldn’t be a damn bit of use one-on-one, walking into court as a lone counselor arguing the case of one small defendant. But that didn’t matter; no one would ever think to offer him such a job. Nor would he accept it. What he would accept, and happily, was the Ray Jones kind of case. Lots of publicity, lots of money, and maybe even a shot at getting the son of a bitch off. Perfect.

  Headquarters of the Ray Jones defense team was a recently defunct furniture showroom, a broad one-story glass-fronted structure across the street from the courthouse. Inside, the building had been a hollow shell, with offices at the rear that had once held the shop’s owner and credit manager, two people with a penchant for making wrong decisions. Gray industrial carpeting had covered the main showroom floor, with indentations in it where the unsold furniture had once stood, and old phone lines had jutted like hairy moles from the walls.

  Now the place was transformed. Beige draperies covered the front showroom windows. Office furniture and equipment and cubicle partitions made a bustling atmosphere within. Phone and fax lines were in place, plus copiers and a darkroom and a water cooler everyone was too busy to gossip around. Twelve car parking had been obtained at the rear of a nearby restaurant. Warren himself was installed in the former owner’s office, with furniture that looked too good to be rented but was, and the onetime credit manager’s office was now the conference room, with bulletin boards, TV, VCR, and a polygraph.

  The staff in this building numbered seventeen, beginning with Warren himself, and Pat Kelly, his secretary of the last twenty-one years, plus five young attorneys and two legal secretaries from Warren’s home office in Dallas, plus Jim Chancellor, who had once himself been the Taney County prosecutor, plus his secretary, plus six various researchers and clerks, all of them very busy.

  What they were mostly busy with at the moment was the list of potential jurors. What with one thing and another, fewer than 9,000 of Taney County’s 22,000 residents were eligible jurors, and Warren wanted to have at least the beginning of a handle on every one of them before Wednesday—day after tomorrow.

  Normally, in a particularly gruesome murder like this one, well covered in the local press, it would be almost automatic to ask for a change of venue to some county beyond the reach of regional papers and TV, but Ray Jones was already a famous person, famous everywhere. The national press would definitely cover this trial, so there was no way to get out from under the glare of publicity.

  Still, fame could cut both ways. In the four years since Ray Jones had built his theater and bought his house out at Porte Regal, he’d done a number of things to ingratiate himself with the community, lending his name to hospital fund drives, putting on a charity performance for the local Boy Scouts, things like that, things any sensible celeb would do when trying to establish roots in a community. Some portion of that pool of potential jurors would harbor warm feelings toward Ray Jones as a result of his good deeds in Branson, and it was part of the job of Warren Thurbridge and his team to find those people and get them on the jury. Swallow the bad publicity, hope the good publicity does some good. Stay at home in Taney County.

  This is where Jim Chancellor came in. A local boy, former prosecutor, he could tell you something about half the people on the jury list—but not till the phone people left.

  In the meantime, Warren busied himself at Pat Kelly’s desk, going through his message slips. Nothing important; he’d spent part of the drive from Branson on his car phone to the Dallas office, getting brought up to date on the firm’s other affairs. In fact, most of these messages were from the media; the usual press feeding frenzy was about to begin. Later on, Warren would be more than happy to wage his Ray Jones battle in public, a kind of warfare at which he excelled, but at the moment journalists were useless to him, and so he’d have nothing to do with them. “Have Julie take care of these,” he told Pat, Julie being the file clerk who would also double as media spokesperson.

  “Right,” Pat said as the phone workers came out of his office, both grinning happily but apologetically, saying, “All fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “No trouble,” Warren assured them, now that the trouble was over, and he and Jim went at last into his office and shut the door, while the two phone workers left the building and walked down the block to the Contel repair truck they’d obtained the same way they’d gotten the IDs and the tools and the hard hats: bribery.

  Stashing their hard hats and tool belts in the back of the truck, the ex–phone repairers drove sedately away, circling one extra block to go past a small RV park. Half a dozen RVs, big, ungainly traveling hotel rooms on wheels, faced the street in a row across the front of the park, and in the driver’s seat of one of these an old geezer sat reading the latest Modern Maturity. When the Contel truck went by, he looked up, grinned, and gave an everything’s fine O sign with thumb and first finger. The former phone people waved and drove on, and the geezer went back to reading about how retirees could avoid paying their fair share of the cost of society. Behind him, two technicians from the Weekly Galaxy hunkered over recording equipment, and the sound of Warren Thurbridge’s voice was heard, saying, “Now, Jim, don’t hold anything back. Say what you want about these people. Not a word of this will ever leave this office.”

  6

  The Weekly Galaxy hospitality suite was jumping when Sara arrived a little after five o’clock. Three connecting rooms of sofas and easy chairs and big-screen satellite TV. A bar in each room, with a generous gent in a black bow tie behind each one. White cloth–covered tables offered the kind of airy snacks that stave off hunger without protecting from inebriation. And present for the largesse were many representatives of the fourth estate.

  The first thing for Sara to do was get a full glass, for protective coloration. A few customers were ahead of her at the bar she chose, giving her an opportunity to see just how lavish a hand these bartenders had, so when her turn came, she asked for a white wine spritzer with lots of ice, and then, as she moved among the three rooms, she didn’t drink it. Nor did she stop to chat with anyone; at first, all she wanted here was a general feel of the occasion.

  The occasion was unbuttoned, is what it was. Mostly, these were the entertainment reporters of our news-hungry nation, more of them from television than print, and more from cable than network, which meant the room wasn’t exactly awash in high-flown rhetoric about the nobility of the journalistic profession. These were mostly wannabes, people who’d started covering showbiz only after they’d given up their own showbiz dreams. Many garage bands, many regional theater productions, many department-store modeling jobs, many public access-channel shows, all shimmered in the past around these people, giving them that weird edge, that manner of caring passionately about something they don’t care anything about at all. It can pass for sophistication, in the dark, with the light behind it.

  While she wandered around, getting a sense of the scene, of the people here, the kind of journalist assembled for this story—okay, the competition, if you insist—familiar faces from the bad old Galaxy days, familiarly ravaged, passed by from time to time. She made no effort to establish contact. Principal among these faces and among the most ravaged were the Down Under Trio, those practiced enticers, hard at work sabotaging American journalism. Sara saw them one at a time, sheepdogging their victims to the pa
rty.

  Harry Razza she saw first, the matinee idol who’d told her about this cheery reporter trap. He came in with a pair of girls all in dark leather, who had perfected the ability to giggle and sneer at the same time, so they were definitely from either a teenage magazine or MTV. Harry gave them to some boys and left.

  A little later, Sara saw another of the Down Unders, Bob Sangster, the one with the big nose and an easy working-class manner, who had reeled in an older gent smoking a pipe and wearing leather elbow patches, a former reporter retired to People, probably. And sometime after that, in came Louis B. Urbiton with a pair of scruffy thirtyish proles under his wing, urban cowboys who’d dressed themselves down at the mall exclusively in imitations—polyester and vinyl. These must be reporters from one of the Galaxy’s direct imitators, the Star or the National Enquirer or one of those. True competitors, in other words, toward whom no mercy would be shown.

  Louis delivered his latest bag to the tender mercies of the nearest bartender, clapped them on the back, and departed, staggering only slightly, eyes only a bit redder and wetter than usual. It was a tough dirty job, but somebody had to do it. And none better than the Down Under Trio.

  “Sara!”

  That had sounded more like a cry for help than a greeting, and when Sara looked around, she saw why. It was Binx Radwell who had called to her, a fog of free-floating angst in the shape of a man. A blond guy in his mid-thirties, Binx Radwell had a more or less normal head and body, except that it was all covered by a quivering padded layer of baby fat. Then equal parts of panic and perspiration had been larded on top of it all, as though he were about to be put on a spit for several hours over an open fire. Given the usual expression in Binx’s eyes, that’s exactly what he expected to happen, any minute.

  Sara’s invariable reaction to Binx was helpless pity combined with helpless impatience. Why didn’t he just pull his socks up, for heaven’s sake? Why was he always so afraid all the time?

  Well, she knew why. He worked for the Galaxy, that’s why, and he lived with his wife Marcie and their children at the very outer edge of his income; disaster was never more than one false step away. A couple of years ago, in fact, Binx had actually been fired, not because he’d been doing anything worse than usual but merely as an example to the troops. Having been an editor, and very well paid, he’d floundered and wept and semidrowned for a little while, and then the Galaxy had hired him back … as a reporter, at half the salary.

  So Binx had every right to look the way he did, which was like an abused child. Giving her pity free rein, reining in her impatience, she said, “Binx, how are you? You look great,” she lied.

  “So do you, Sara.” He tried a smile, Binx did, which looked very much like an expression you might see in the display case at the fish market. “Marcie and I are thinking about a separation,” he said, lying right back at her.

  “Oh, you and Marcie were born for each other,” Sara assured him.

  Binx looked more stricken than ever. “You really think so?”

  Looking around, Sara said, “Whose team is this? Not Boy Cartwright, I hope,” she said, naming her least-favorite Galaxy editor.

  Within his terror, Binx looked almost pleased, proud of himself. “My team,” he said with simple modesty.

  Delighted, Sara said, “Binx! You’re an editor again!”

  “After Massa died—”

  “What? Massa died?”

  Deadpan, he said, “Massa’s in de cold, cold ground.”

  Bewildered, not getting it, Sara said, “You’re kidding me.”

  “You hadn’t heard? Come over here,” Binx said, taking her elbow, fondling it, leading her to the quietest corner of the room, saying, “It’s true. It happened at the morning editorial meeting. He was yelling at the editors, you know, yelling there weren’t any good stories anymore, pounding on the table and waving that beer bottle around, and all of a sudden he made the most kind of a jungle sound, all deep and loud and rattly—we could hear it way over at the reporter tables—and flop. Right on his desk, in the elevator.”

  Massa, actual name Bruno DeMassi, was the creator and owner and publisher of the Weekly Galaxy, a man of many appetites, most of them gross. “That’s hard to believe,” Sara said. “The Galaxy without Massa.”

  “It was so weird, Sara,” Binx told her. “He just lay there facedown, arms stretched out, spilling his beer, and he twitched a couple times, and nobody wanted to go near him, and finally Boy went over. You know how he simpers and does that English accent.”

  “Oh, don’t remind me.”

  “Oh, good, you remember,” Binx said. “Boy said, ‘Chief? Chief?’ And he touched Massa, and then he turned around, and he was very solemn and he put his hand over his heart like Napoleon, and he said, ‘The Chief is with us no more. The Chief is dead.’ And somebody—nobody knows who, just somebody—somebody said, ‘And we have a new Pope.’ And everybody started to laugh.” Binx blinked in remembered amazement. “Nobody could stop,” he said. “It got everybody. There’s Massa lying dead on his desk, and hundreds and hundreds of people laughing. It went all through the building, upstairs, downstairs, people holding their sides, people falling down on the floor, they were laughing so hard. And even when Jacob Harsch came down from the top floor to find out what was going on, nobody could stop. It just went on and on.” Binx slowly shook his head, his sweaty round face pinkly incandescent with the leftover glow of the awe of that transcendent moment.

  “Is Harsch running the Galaxy now?” Sara asked. Jacob Harsch had been Massa’s assistant, as cold as Massa had been hot.

  But Binx said, “Oh no. He’s out. They brought some people up from hell to run things.”

  “Hell? What do you mean?”

  “It turned out,” Binx said, “there was some sort of corporation deal, and when Massa died, all this money went to his widow, and a corporation owns us. They’re a Florida real estate development company, so you can imagine.”

  “Barely,” Sara said.

  “They took their most evil executives,” Binx said, “the ones that snap at sticks you put through the bars of the cage, and they put them in charge of us. Oh, Sara,” Binx said, and fondled her forearm this time, “you got out when the getting was good.”

  “I guess so,” Sara said, and they were interrupted at that point by the arrival of Don Grove, the world’s most pessimistic reporter, another former coworker of Sara’s, who this time ignored Sara and turned his doleful countenance on Binx, saying, “I don’t suppose you could use—”

  “You remember Sara, Don,” Binx said.

  Don considered Sara, considered his answer. “Yes,” he decided, and turned back to Binx. “I don’t suppose you could use the dead woman’s grandmother, got proof the family’s related to Princess Di.”

  “We’re spreading that story, Don,” Binx said.

  “Oh.” Don nodded at Sara. “Nice to see you again,” he said without enthusiasm, and went away.

  Binx looked fondly after his retreating reporter. “Good old Don,” he said. “He’s one of the few things in life that keeps me cheerful.”

  “Oh, you,” Sara said. “You’re just sunny by nature.”

  7

  A little after seven, best friend Cal Denny drove Ray Jones from his home in the Porte Regal enclave out onto 165 north, headed up to the Strip, and turned left. They weren’t in the Acura SNX sports car, since the Sheriff’s Department still had that impounded as evidence in the murder case, but Ray had three other cars at the house, so it was the maroon Jaguar town car they rode in, Cal at the right-hand-drive wheel, Ray in the front passenger seat on the left.

  Traffic was its usual mess on the Strip, the tourist families inching along, grubby little faces pressed to grubby safety-glass windows, looking for tonight’s thrill. In this direction, they could choose from theaters housing Roy Clark, Mickey Gilley, Jim Stafford, Ray Jones, Boxcar Willie, Christy Lane, Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard, and Ray Stevens, plus wowzer-dowzer attractions like Waltzing W
aters (exactly what it sounds like, plus colored lights), White Water (exactly what it sounds like, plus you in an inadequate rubber raft), Mutton Hollow (CRAFTS, CRAFTS, CRAFTS), and a variety of foods much faster but not much more interesting than the traffic.

  With a seating capacity of 827, the Ray Jones Country Theater was about standard for the neighborhood, on a par with Roy Clark’s Celebrity Theatre on one side of him and Mickey Gilley’s Family Theatre on the other side and the Jim Stafford Theatre across the way. (You say theatre; I say theater.) Other theaters were bigger. Down the road, Cristy Lane filled two thousand seats twice a day in season, as did Andy Williams back the other way. And every one of those seats was occupied by someone who’d gotten there by car, along the Strip.

  And this wasn’t even the worst. Summer family time was pretty bad, but wait till after Labor Day, when all the families have gone home to stick their sticky kids back in school, and the retirees in their RVs show up. The retirees hate kids, so they wait till September. Then they come to Branson, get out on the Strip, forget where they were going, and sllllooooowwwww dooooowwwwwnnnnn.

  It wasn’t too bad this evening, though. The maroon Jag bopped along at speeds up to a mile an hour, inching by Roy Clark, and as Cal drove, his bony serious face as intent as though he were completing one of the trickier parts of Le Mans, they discussed the situation: “Reporters are starting to show up,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Cal agreed, nodding his head while intently watching the overloaded station wagon from Mississippi in front of him. “You want me to pick one, huh?”

  “But the right one,” Ray told him. “We got all these entertainment-beat people, calling in markers all over the place, agents and bookers. I’m getting calls from L.A. and New York and Nashville and every fucking place. Everybody wants an interview, and I’m not gonna give an interview.”

  “Right,” Cal said.